The Summer Children (The Collector #3)(27)

“Oh hell no, he will run screaming for the parking lot.” I laugh, taking a few steps into the apartment. The walls are painted a delicate, icy sort of pink, with one wall a bolder pink for accent. The sliding glass door leading out to the tiny balcony is covered not only by vertical blinds to block the sun, but also by a sheer pink drape and bracketed by lavender and baby blue curtains, with one of those . . . what is it, a dust ruffle? A valance? The shorter thing that goes over the tops of the curtains, anyway, and like the curtains, it’s trimmed in two lines of pink ribbon with tiny bows at intervals. Every single thing in the room looks perfectly coordinated, like a spread in Martha Stewart Living, possibly like Blessed Saint Martha of the Cupcakes came down herself and anointed it. The same is true in the kitchen, which has coordinating towel sets hanging from the drawer and oven handles.

The only mess I can see is around the dining room table with its pale yellow and mint green layers of tablecloths. Two of the chairs have masses of clothing draped over them, one has a half-full box open on the seat, and the other a mostly full trash bag.

“Holy fucking God, Eliza Sterling. I . . . I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw so many ruffles. Or are those flounces?”

Her face is burning now, and she busies herself with hanging her purse just so next to her keys. “Please don’t tell Eddison.”

“I couldn’t possibly spoil the surprise.” I can’t stop laughing, and the poor girl looks more embarrassed by the minute, so I drape myself over her shoulder in a kind of koala hug. “Why didn’t you ever say you were so freaking girly outside of work?”

That at least gets me a crooked smile. “It’s hard enough to get taken seriously. Can you imagine the guys finding out about this?”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

I slump into her, digging my chin into her shoulder. “I’m trying to remember the last time you sparred with a man and it didn’t end with him getting slammed repeatedly into the mats. You always kick their asses. It’s why Eddison won’t spar with you. When they can beat you sparring, then they can give you shit about the pink and frills.”

She laughs and pushes me away. “Let me go change and I’ll help you get the couch set up.”

I change in the living room, into a T-shirt and boxers freshly liberated from Eddison’s dresser because my other ones really need to be washed, and discover that the drawer of one of the end tables is actually a tiny gun safe. “Oh-two-one-four-two-nine,” she announces when she comes back out and sees me looking at it. “I know it’s stupid but I wanted something I didn’t have to think about.”

“Oh-two-one-four, that’s what, Valentine’s Day? Two-nine?”

“Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, 1929.”

I digest that for a moment, looking around at all the ruffles and pastels and perfectly coordinated decorations. “You are a complicated person, Eliza Sterling.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Oh, hell yes.”

With her coffee table moved up against the entertainment center, there’s enough room for the couch to pull out into a bed, which we finish off with a complete bedding set she grabs from the linen closet. She just rolls her eyes at my intermittent snickering.

“I can’t help it,” I insist. “It’s just . . . you’re so severe at work, you only wear black and white, you always have your hair back, you’re so damn careful with your makeup, and then here it’s this absolute fairy tale. I love it.”

“You do?”

“Absolutely! It’s just going to take my brain some time to reconcile the two. Anyway, you should have seen how long it took me to stop laughing the first time I saw Eddison’s apartment.”

“Really? But his apartment is exactly the way I’d picture it.”

“If you were going to change it, to make it even more Eddison, what would you do?”

She ponders that while easing the pillows into the cases and fluffing them. “Take the pictures off the wall and change the table to something boring,” she says eventually. “Those aren’t his touches.”

“Priya.”

“I adore that girl.”

We don’t stay up to talk; it’s been a long couple of days, after all. As tired as I am, sleep takes some time in coming. I haven’t slept in my own bed in a couple of weeks now, and while the couch-bed is fairly comfortable as far as couch-beds go, it’s still a couch-bed.

But that’s not really what’s keeping me awake. We live half our lives on the road, on the beds of whatever hotel we happen to land in. We’ve slept on couches in precincts and even sometimes on conference room floors when there wasn’t time for more than a nap.

I keep thinking of Sarah, alone in her room at night, listening for footsteps down the hall, wondering if she’d be left alone for a night, or if her stepfather would enter. If he’d put a hand to her mouth and remind her in a whisper that she had to be quiet, she couldn’t let her sister or mother hear. Sitting in the kitchen in the morning, aching and sick, staring at her mother and wondering if it was really possible she hadn’t heard, that she didn’t know.

It isn’t impossible to heal from that, but it leaves scars. It changes the way you look at people, how far you can trust or let people in. It changes your habits, even your desires and dreams. It changes who you are, and no matter how much you struggle back toward that place, that person you started as, you never actually get there. Some change is irreversible.